Thursday, March 2, 2017

Republican Party has exhausted two ideological themes it has ridden since about 1980, 'free markets' and social conservatism, needs new ones if it wants to survive. Enter the rich theme of economic nationalism and Donald Trump to give the Republican Party a reason to exist. Deep State Republicans not interested-Sept. 2015, Ian Fletcher

"I'm neither endorsing nor condemning Mr. Trump, but I do think he's
trying to save the Republican party from itself in a very rational way.
The last thing he is is a clown or dilettante. (OK, maybe a clown.)

Any ideologues out there, I'm sorry: American history makes quite clear thatpartisan ideological themes don't last forever, in either party. They're good for a few decades, then they evolve or get dumped.

(Permanent matters of national principle may last forever, but they’re a
different issue, and they’re not the ideological possessions of either
party, so no party can win competitive leverage in elections by
appealing to them.)

First, considerthe exhaustion of free-market ideology.
This doesn't mean that free markets per se, which obviously have
enormous validity, are dead as an idea. But it does mean that pushing
even further in the direction of free markets is dead as an idea.

Why?
Most obviously, the 2008 financial crisis, whose effects we're still
dealing with, was an effect of markets allowed to run amok, not of
markets being insufficiently free. (Yes, I know you can blame it all on
the government, but that's a tendentious "reality is the opposite of
what you see" argument.)

There's a happy medium between too much
and too little regulation, and we've basically reached the limit of our
ability to improve our economy by deregulating further. Five years ago, I predicted this would happen. Now it has.

In
public perception, this wasn't always the case. It certainly wasn't in
1980, when Ronald Reagan rode this theme to victory. And argue the
timing if you like, but surely the reader recalls the romanticism about
markets of the late 1990s? Remember California deregulating its
electricity market in 1996? (Which handed control over to Enron, by the way, and led to blackouts in Silicon Valley.)

The increased public interest in economic equality is also playing a role here. There are conservative
policies that reduce inequality, but they're old-school paternalist
conservative policies, not free-market conservative policies. (Some
people will tell you that "conservative" simply equals "free market," but this is simply ignorant of history, [influence of Libertarian Koch brothers] though I don't have the space to elaborate here.)

Trump is not the first person to come up with this strategy: as I noted in an articleduring the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was going in this direction already, albeit much less aggressively than Trump.

Romney pledged to crack down on China's currency manipulation. He
threatened the use of countervailing duties if necessary,a serious and
previously ideologically tabooattempt to blunt America's trade deficit.
He said illegal immigrants should "self deport."

Why was Romney less
aggressive?For one thing, that was several years ago, and the causative
trends hadn't yet gone so far. Two, he wasn't a billionaire, only a
humble multi-millionaire, so he had to cater to the Republican donor
class.Which, while not sincerely socially conservative, very much adores free-market ideology as the perfect rationalization for their
crony-capitalist reality.(Their interpretation of "free" markets is
"government won't interfere with private distortions of markets in my
favor.")

Come to think of it, even Patrick Buchanan got there
first, in the sense of taking economic-nationalist positions
(anti-free-trade, anti-immigration) as a Republican primary candidate in
1992.

But Buchanan, of course, never attracted more than a
fringe following. It's no mystery why. One, he wasn't a billionaire who
could finance an entire campaign while defying the donor class and
cowing the Republican establishment with the tacit threat of a
third-party run tipping the election to the Democrats. Two, the
credibility of "even freer markets are always the solution" economics
hadn't exhausted itself in 1992. (As noted above, it didn't even peak
until the late 1990s.) Three, there was not yet a collapse of social conservatism forcing a search for new ideological themes.

So economic nationalism is a rich theme that's been
waitingto be exploited for a long time.Like, say, civil rights in the
early 1960s.
Mr. Trump's comically blustering persona,which seems
to confuse a lot of commentators,fits perfectly into this picture.
Why? Becauseit enables him to seem much more right-wing than he really is,
which is essential to retreating from obsolete rightist positions
without incurring the wrath of primary voters....

And no, Donald Trump is not a “fascist.” Not even close. Which some people seem to genuinely believe: Paul Krugman wrote that
“Trump is trying to become America’s Mussolini,” and there are other
examples. Pick the right Italian, for a start! He’s plausibly an
American Silvio Berlusconi, the playboy media billionaire who became
prime minister in 2001. Or he’s a billionaire Huey Long, the populist
demagogue from Louisiana who sparred with FDR in the 1930s. Or maybe
even a non-alcoholic Boris Yeltsin, a maniacal figure who kicked over
the entire Soviet establishment. But jackboots? Nope.

"So crazy, in fact, that despite not being an ultra-partisan
fanatic, I am forced to the conclusion that either the GOP leadership is
even stupider than ordinary political cynicism would assume, or the
plan is simply not meant in earnest. (Is it a trap for Trump, to
discredit him if he’s foolish enough to buy into it? Dunno. A trap for
the idea of tax-based trade reform? Ditto. But either of these
hypotheses would make more sense than the idea that they actually mean
it.)"...

As to the GOP Establishment, it just wants to be left alone. Being a permanent minority would be fine with them-it's what they're used to.Until 1994, the Democrats had controlled the House for 40 straight years. After Nov. 2008, the Republican Party barely existed and deservedly so. They were very happy. If a concerned voter called they said, Hey, don't look at me, the other party controls everything. In 2010 we gave the GOP House a historic landslide. This enraged the GOP.They hated all the people we gave them, spent all their time trying to shut them up and get rid of them.
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